Chris Lombardi puts defense and security under the spotlight, as he shares his takes on recent NATO and EU cooperation and provides insight into the company’s own long-term strategic partnerships in Europe.

Three trends are currently driving the global electricity sector: decarbonization, decentralization and differentiation. Utilities are making significant contributions to mitigate carbon emissions, while a technology revolution is …

Ploughing a different furrow

June’s Rio+20 summit in Brazil may not go down in history as the most consequential meeting of leaders. But one significant outcome, a follow-up to the momentous 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, was a recognition by world leaders that farming practices will have to change to meet rising challenges of feeding a growing population.

In the final outcome document, leaders resolved to increase sustainable agricultural production. It was a significant step, but a political declaration will not be enough to stop harmful agricultural practices that are counter-productive to long-term food supply. These practices, which degrade soil over the long term in favour of short-term gain, still take place on a massive scale, an ‘own goal’ in the fight against famine.

Speaking to European Voice in early October, Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said nations need to start farming more sensibly.

“We are destroying arable land every year in unprecedented numbers of hectares, while at the same time saying we don’t know where we’re going to grow our food in the future,” he said. “There is a trend here that at some point is going to lead us into a crisis situation. We need to ask the question: what is the agricultural production model of the 21st century?”

As the world population grows, the area of land available for arable use will remain roughly constant, so the only route to feeding more mouths is to make land more productive. Different stakeholders have different visions of how to make that a reality. Crop science companies such as Monsanto and Bayer are developing new methods of plant-breeding and crop management that aim to make crops more resistant to disease and to adverse weather conditions.

Mark Buckingham, head of public affairs for Monsanto, says crop science has a huge potential in the battle to increase productivity. “We have reached a global situation where record harvests are required every year,” he says. “That means we either need to be increasing the area of farmland or farmers need to be using new tools and techniques to grow more on the same amount of land.”

However, Europeans have remained sceptical of crop science, particularly the use of genetically modified organisms (GMs) to boost tolerance to pesticides. This has stalled authorisation in Europe of new GM crops. At the same time, the United States and other regions have forged ahead with cultivating GMs.

Buckingham says that as long as the European regulatory regime remains mostly shut to GMs, Monsanto is concentrating its activities in Europe on agronomy products (such as soil data and analysis) and conventional breeding – working with the existing genetics of a seed to create superior strains. But he believes Europe is losing out on further potential by blocking GMs.

Working with nature

However, anti-GM and anti-pesticide campaigners have accused the crop science industry of scare-mongering in order to obtain backing for a food technology that delivers little benefit to anyone but the companies that own the patents on seeds and produce the pesticides designed to work in conjunction with them. They brand the obsession with crop breeding, pesticides and fertilizers (see below) as a distraction from simpler solutions such as increasing biodiversity.

Tony Simons, director-general of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, has been meeting policy-makers in Brussels to advocate the use of agro-forestry to make land more fertile naturally and sustainably. “We have chased the holy grail of productivity and income at the expense of the land,” he says, citing the overuse of fertilisers and plant-protection chemicals. “Nothing is better at putting organic matter into the soil than a tree,” he says, claiming that increased biodiversity provides soil with essential nutrients for plant growth and makes it more resilient over the long term.

Crop science can increase productivity, he recognises, but GMs can make only a small contribution, while easier gains from planting more trees around farmland and increasing biodiversity are being ignored. “GMs would be great if they really addressed issues facing farmers, but instead it’s all based on controlling the market,” he says. “If they were working on drought tolerance as heavily as they are working on [GMs and pesticides], you could take their arguments about food security more seriously.”

The European Commission has chosen to make the kind of biodiversity advocated by Simons an integral part of its proposal for reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), proposing to tie 30% of direct payments to fulfilment of green criteria including set-aside of land for biodiversity, such as by planting a plot of trees (see page 20).

But many MEPs and member states have been fiercely resisting this, particularly some from southern member states who say their specific crops will not benefit from such measures. Simons accuses them of failing to see the bigger picture. “Why should you be paid to do something that hurts the land around you?” he asks. Biodiversity is good for the agricultural system as a whole, he says, and it is therefore right to tie payments to it.

Biodiversity is being encouraged through other measures. Last year, the European Commission published a biodiversity strategy which set a goal of eradicating the most harmful invasive species and ensuring compliance with the EU’s habitats directive by 2020. An EU-wide monitoring, assessment and reporting framework on biodiversity will eventually be developed, perhaps being proposed in 2014.

But the Commission has had difficulty in generating enthusiasm among member states. The EU failed to meet a goal, set a decade ago, of halting biodiversity loss by 2010. Today, ecosystems such as forests, coral reefs, freshwaters and soils are still in decline.

A proposal for a directive to protect Europe’s soil and to make it more sustainably productive has been stalled since 2007. A paper published by the Commission earlier this year estimated that soil deterioration is costing €38 billion a year in Europe, through loss of agricultural productivity and damage from flooding. Recent changes of heart in Germany may mean the directive could be revived. Farmers group Cope-Cogeca has fiercely resisted the soil directive. But Dacian Ciolos¸, the European commissioner for agriculture, has said the greening proposals of the CAP (see page 20) will not be enough to solve the problem of land degradation in Europe.

Campaigners insist the EU should focus on crop rotation, biodiversity and soil protection to increase agricultural productivity. But crop scientists say by shutting out technology such as GMO, Europe would play a dangerous game with its own food supply.